Can a Podcast Create B2B Lead Generation for a Healthcare Market Researcher?

Priscilla McKinney: Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and mama bird over here. As always, your host, I find amazing people in marketing and marketing research to talk with you about what they are thinking about, what is going on in the industry and just have a really great conversation. So you're gonna love my next guest and as always. They were introduced to me through someone else who I really adore. So this is what makes great conversations. Sean Jordan, welcome to the show.

Sean Jordan: Hey Priscilla, thanks for having me.

Priscilla McKinney: Absolutely, it's going to be so fun. We were at a great event together. We went to X Day with Question Pro out in Austin and of course they put on a fantastic party so we had a great time. So I think we were chilling out and the connection just it works when people create an environment where humans can really connect and we started having a conversation very quickly that really was meaningful.

Sean Jordan: Absolutely. One of the things that I really appreciated about X Day is there were people from all kinds of different marketing disciplines there. So you got to learn a lot just in very short conversations you have with people.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, if you don't know Sean Jordan, let me just give you a little bit of a bio so you know where we're coming from today and what we're going to talk about. But Sean Jordan is a marketing research and insights professional who does kind of it all. So you want some quality, you want some quant, you want some writing, you want to teach. This is one cool aspect that he does that not everybody does. Of course, I actually saw him when he was presenting at X-Day. He is also the host of the new the Marketing Gateway podcast. We're going to talk about that a little bit more today because I love talking to other podcasters. So he is also the president of the Research and Planning Group in St. Louis. So welcome to the show. This is going to be fun, Sean. Yes, you do. You definitely do. Well, we talked a little bit when we met about a niche that you're in in health care.

Sean Jordan: Right.

Priscilla McKinney: And so I'm gonna start there because I think that's an interesting place where we're seeing maybe some resistance to what's going on in insights. It could be said that healthcare organizations are notoriously slow to adopt marketing best practices and a lot of them still don't have dedicated insights teams. So tell me a little bit about what's behind that resistance, what they're missing. You know, like what's that opportunity that's lost by treating research really as an afterthought?

Sean Jordan: Yeah, well I've been doing healthcare research for about, gosh, 17 years now, and in that time, one of the things that I have learned pretty consistently is that many of the cutting edge things that are going on in marketing are about five or 10 years away from making it to healthcare. So they tend to be behind the curve in a lot of different practices, and it's not because they are bad intentioned or because they are not trying to be good at it, it's just because they have a focus that is different from a lot of organizations, and that is trying to keep people well and keep people alive. And that's where a lot of their operational budget goes. So in terms of marketing, how do you market a hospital? How do you market a doctor's office? It's something that people tend to avoid unless they really need it. And then once they need it, they tend to have really, really high expectations for it. So it's a challenging environment. And then there's a lot of ideas within those organizations about what their brand even means. with a hospital, for example, if you ask a doctor or a nurse what the hospital is, they're gonna give you a very different answer from maybe a administrative person or from an executive there or from a patient. And so they have to really spend a lot of time trying to understand what the meaning of their brand and their identity and their presence in the community is, and then try to figure out how to make that something that people want to hear about instead of just something that people are looking to hear about when they have a need.

Priscilla McKinney: Mm-hmm. Okay, I just had a 16 year old in the emergency room for a broken collarbone. So you and I talked about this a little bit because it was fresh on my mind at that moment. And interestingly enough, I'm a bizarre person to talk to about this because my husband volunteers for the largest health system in our area. And then also I used to handle the marketing of that same institution. So I think I'm coming at it from a lot of interesting angles.

Sean Jordan: Yeah.

Priscilla McKinney: But you and I talked about this interesting paradox of the emergency department and what is going on there. So tell me a little bit about that emergency room paradox and what you think is of interest there.

Sean Jordan: So you would think that the front door to the hospital would be the place where they put the most attention and effort in terms of making it something that people want to experience, right? And the reality is emergency departments a lot of times are actually subcontracted to a physician practice or a physician group, and they're not run by the hospital. The hospital is there to get the patients that are being admitted or to see the patients that need follow ups. but the emergency department itself is handled by someone else. And so they tend to be absolutely miserable places to go for healthcare. And in fact, when you look at the survey data, and I often get to read this firsthand, you see people talking about the terrible time they had in the emergency department, and then the transition they had where, once I got admitted into the hospital, things were great. And I have never been able to understand why hospitals continue to allow this to happen because so many of the impressions that get made about their healthcare system or their hospital or even their individual healthcare workers come from that emergency department experience. It's when people feel the most vulnerable and when they are remembering a lot of the experience that they have because it's so new and so different. And yet it's probably the worst experience they have in the hospital. So I have been on every client that I work with to try to be better in that way. And hopefully the healthcare industry gets that at some point.

Priscilla McKinney: The very nature of it is typically when you're in the emergency room, you're probably having one of the worst days of your life. Very possibly, not always, but that is very scary for any of us who are parents. That's even doubly scary. But let's talk about that a little bit because what you're talking about is not only a paradox that it's the front door and yet we treat it like as if it's like, you know, the last experience people have, it really is that hospitality moment where we really take that word from. But there's also, what you're saying is there's kind of an embedded resistance to changing that, like everybody kind of knows this. How do you continue to provide insights to companies when they go, yeah, yeah, we know, we know the VED is horrible. Okay, what are you gonna do to fix it? So how does that make you feel as a researcher in the middle? How do you deal with that?

Sean Jordan: So I'm a big fan of having executives get to observe research directly, if we're doing a focus group, or if they can watch interviews, or things like that, because a lot of times they're really distanced from the front line. And even if they go and sit in their emergency department for an hour or two, they don't get the full story of how people feel. And so I actually heard about a health care system where the executives challenged themselves to go and sit in their emergency department for days and just talk to patients. and just find out how things were going, not to offer them anything, not to try to change anything, but just to sit and listen. And they were transformed by that experience. They actually went and did something very serious to transform their emergency department because of that experience. Because they could see that it wasn't just any one little thing. It was a lot of things about the waiting and discomfort and the apprehension and the fear and anxiety and all of those other things that get wrapped up in that experience that they weren't gonna require an easy fix, they were gonna require a systematic fix. And I think it takes that level of listening to really get there.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, yeah. And you know, when you say systematic fix, that sounds like it's a system, but it's actually fixing people. Right. It sounds easier when you said systematic fix. When you say change people, I got worried.

Sean Jordan: Very true.

Sean Jordan: A lot of times it really requires soft skills training with your frontline staff. You know, nurses are among the most empathetic people in the world. I have met so many nurses that are just so kind and so caring and concerning. But when you put them behind a computer and their job is just to tick off boxes on a medical chart, they lose that empathy a little bit. And so they need some training and they need some reinforcement to help them to remember to look at people, to make eye contact, to assure them that things are going to be okay while they're gathering this really necessary medical information.

Priscilla McKinney: Right, yeah, I love that. It is really kind of looking at the people who are there and saying, how can we play to their strengths? You know, you don't need to reinvent the nurse. They came here for a reason. We had this nurse and he was just fantastic. And I remember commenting to me and my husband going, OK, well, get his name because this guy was so empathetic. He was so good with a 16 year old. He just understood what's going on. And to your point, you know, it is the front door. It was, you know, in our case we had a great experience and it really made all the difference. So let me kind of back up a little bit to your day-to-day. Really people come to you and they need help. In fact, I want to get a little bit later, talk a little bit about how do you get some leads because you have an interesting job. But I imagine that people coming to you are saying things like, well, we want a focus group about blah, blah, blah, or I need a survey about blah, blah, blah, or we have our net promoter score, you know, in our survey that's happening at EDM. What do we want to do with it? OK, they can be asking for all kinds of things, but tell me what it sounds like when you help redirect or when you help expand the conversation or when you really are trying to get at the bigger picture of what they really are asking for.

Sean Jordan: A lot of times when people are coming to me asking for research, it is because they know somebody that I've worked with. So there's some kind of referral involved. But even when they're not, much of the time it's because they've been tasked with getting some information and they don't really know how to get it. And they kind of imagine that maybe a focus group or a survey or something like that will get them there. And part of my job is to really listen to what their informational needs are and what their strategic purpose is behind it. to determine, number one, is it worth the time and trouble and expense of research? Because research is not cheap, it's an expensive process. And then number two, is this the right way to get the information? Are we talking to the right group of people? Are we talking to them in the right way? Are they gonna give us honest answers? So I can offer an example of where I often turn work away, and that is when people wanna know, maybe in a sales context or a persuasion context, why people say no to something. The literature academically says that is a dead end. You should not ask people that question because they cannot tell you. They will make up reasons why they say no. They will sometimes invent rationales. Sometimes they'll double down on whatever their emotion was in the moment. But the reality is a lot of times people don't know why they say no. But they do know why they say yes. So we can learn a lot more from why people said yes and why they became a customer and what their thought process was than we can from asking them, well, why wouldn't you be a customer? And that's a really important insight to share with someone that's trying to get to that information because we have to be able to trust this information at the end of the day. If you're going to go through the time and trouble of hiring a research agency to give you volumes and volumes of information, I mean, our reports can be 300, 400 pages long with the appendix included. You want to make sure that that information is reliable and useful. And so a lot of that listening involves trying to get to that point. How do we make sure that you're going to get something valuable and that you can really act on? and not just something that's gonna sit on a shelf.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, let's do part two of that because you're talking about really reframing the conversation and helping them understand what kind of research they need in order to get their question answered. But let me go that next step of one issue that's been kind of plaguing the industry and that is data quality. So let's say we do decide that we want to do surveys and we want to open ourselves up to this. What are you seeing that's making you worry about the quality of the data that we're relying on now that we've said, okay, well, we did align ourselves strategically to what the company needed. Now let's go do the research. Uh-oh, is the research really high value?

Sean Jordan: So I think one of the problems that our industry kind of has developed for itself is overuse of research panelists. And research panelists, for anyone that's not aware, are people who have opted in to be available to a research process. So they're kind of on-demand survey takers, basically. And they can be on-demand focus group participants or on-demand interview subjects or that as well. But the problem is that they kind of self-select to be the kind of people that want to give their opinion. And then there's also an awful lot of fraud because a lot of times panelists get an incentive for participating in a survey. And an incentive of $10 or $15 might not sound like that much in United States dollars, but to people around the world, if they do a few surveys, that can add up really quick in terms of the conversion rate. And so we have this big problem in panels where there are a lot of people that use VPNs or they use other spoofing technologies to make it look like they're in the United States when they're really not. And we're at the point where 30 to 40 % of panel respondents can be fraudulent. And that's not a statistic that I made up. That's what the people that sell these panels will tell you. So we have to be really vigilant about that. And there are all kinds of techniques to get around it. But just as we began to get a handle on that, generative AI came up and allowed people to spoof using generative AI platforms that are even harder to detect. So the problem is going to continue. And we're at the point, you even to the point where you say, I want to talk to people face to face. Well, you know, deep fake videos are a thing now too. They've been used. People have seen them in use in some of the studies that have been going on. So it's an arms race that you have to take seriously. And my solution is to try to find a different way to talk to people, to try to make sure and verify that they are real people. And that might mean not having the speed and the convenience of a panel, but it means better data.

Priscilla McKinney: Okay, well, let's kind of go from better data to this next question because we talked about, you know, health care and I know a lot of people are very disillusioned with it, call it disease care, etc. And then we talked about this like this high stakes moment of an emergency department situation that could really be better. Okay, maybe we thought that was high enough stakes. Let's go and move. move it up a notch because I know that you actually work pretty extensively with organ procurement organizations. Now this is obviously a life or death situation. The stakes really, really can't be higher here. So help me understand what you're doing in research and what kind of an approach you're doing that helps differentiate your work when the outcomes could be, you know, you know, a loss of life, a loss of an opportunity at extending life. So tell me a little bit about your work in that space.

Sean Jordan: So there are hundreds of thousands of people right now waiting for a transplantable organ. It might be a kidney or a liver. It could be a heart or lungs or pancreas. And there are not enough people that are eligible to be donors to meet that need. And so we have this organ procurement system that is federally designated. It's protected by CMS. And it's all not-for-profit organizations that they have these territories where they're able to go and work with the hospitals to get those organs from the people that are willing to donate them to give them to the people that are on the transplant list. I work a lot with, I've worked with about 40 of these organizations or over 50 of them across the country, but I've worked a lot with our local one, where I am in St. Louis, to really understand these issues because they're just down the street from my office and I can go and talk to them. And one of the biggest issues that they run into is not people's willingness to be donors, because a lot of people actually love the idea of organ donation. They're very generous. They love the idea of leaving kind of a lasting legacy behind, and they feel like it will benefit not just the recipient of their organs, but also their families, knowing that something good came out of the tragedy of their death. But a lot of times when these situations are happening, it's not just that you're dying of natural causes and you're an organ donor. it's that you were in a motor vehicle accident or you have a gunshot wound or you have you overdosed on a drug or a head trauma or something that allows your body to be what we call brain dead, but not to be dead where the organs are starting to die. And so those are really rare and high involvement situations where there's a lot of drama. And sometimes the families are not as on board with the decision as the donors are. So there's a lot of context that goes into this and that the need for organs pushes the OPOs, the organ procurement organizations, to try new and different things, to be able to maximize the amount of organs that they're able to recover and transplant. And sometimes those things lead to bad practice and controversy. So they have to think a lot about those things too. So it becomes a really complex situation because we're literally talking about life or death. People that cannot get those transplantable organs will die. The people that are giving them are going to die and that's a very sad thing, but a very good thing can come out of it if it's done right. And that's where a lot of our research focuses on how do we continue to keep that confidence and keep those relationships strong so it can be done right and in the best possible way and save lives.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh, it's such interesting work. I would love to be a fly on the wall. I am an organ donor. And, you know, I grew up in Europe and it is a standard where you're meant to be an organ donor there unless you say no. Whereas in the U.S. it's an opt-in situation. And so it's interesting to hear you say that actually it's not really a problem with getting people to sign up so much as having the family on board when this situation is happening. So that's enlightening to me. Yeah, so let's talk, let's shift gears a little bit about your actual company. So tell people about your day-to-day, but I am interested in, in really you mentioned at the very beginning that you get referred in by people word of mouth. Okay, well that's great. But you know, do you have any other lead generation strategies or how do people find your company?

Sean Jordan: This is such a great and timely question for me because as you mentioned at the beginning, we're in the midst of launching a podcast and the podcast, that's exactly our goal is to try to find people that are here in St. Louis that are in the marketing community or who are in the Midwest and learn from them and try to find ways that we can be of benefit to them. And so that's one of the things that I'm doing right now to try to build that network. And I'm also part of our local American Marketing Association chapter, and I'm doing some work with them. And I also just try to go out and talk to people, and I teach too. What I have found in research is that what we do is complicated enough and expensive enough that generally people are not shopping you just for research. They're shopping you for expertise and knowledge. And so if you have that kind of referral that comes in from someone that's worked with you and they know the quality of your work, you are much better qualified than if people are just finding your website and pulling you off a list of research agencies. And I've been on a lot of work where it's request for proposal or where it's an open bidding process. And it's hard to get through those because I don't always tick off all the right boxes because I don't have a very large team. We have a lot of people that work with us on more of a contract basis. And I don't have necessarily the industry expertise in every single thing that they're looking for. But if they talk to me and they understand that I'm also in the classroom teaching MBA students and Master of Marketing Research students, and that I have a broad range of knowledge, I'm much more likely to be able to pick up that work. And so that's really the trick behind being at the agency level is that you have to be able to have people that can vouch for you. And you get that not just through working for them, but also through getting to know them, through building those relationships and having those networking opportunities. and it's hard work and it's not something that I naturally enjoy doing. I love people but just the the tedium of going and having to meet new people and make all the small talk and try to find ways that we can connect is it's hard but it's worth it because often if you can have a substantive conversation and hear what their real problems are maybe research is a solution to that and and that can help lead to something that really benefits both of you.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, well, I mean, as owners, we have to be thinking about this all the time, you know, and, you know, as the president of the research and planning group, I'm sure this is, you know, this is, you know, something that does keep you up at night. What does it mean when you're a niche expertise as it relates to B2B lead generation. You don't want anybody and everybody. You need very few, but very specific people who really want your expertise. I totally understand that. But let's jump into that podcast. In terms of lead generation strategies, a podcast is an amazing thing. I know this word over 425 episodes into Ponderings from the Perch, and I do get a lot of lead generation from you know, this podcast because I've created this following for years and years, but people get to really hear me. They get to understand that I'm not just giving away brown bag solutions, that I'm listening to what people need and that I have this expertise in market research. Okay, let's bring that over to Shawn Jordan. So tell me about the podcast that you want you to do and what is the, you know, what is the wave of magic wand moment for your podcast?

Sean Jordan: Well, you know, anytime I'm gonna do something, I wanna try to bring myself into it as much as possible. I have a really weird and varied background. I used to work in the comic book industry. I used to work in the video game industry. I managed a McDonald's for a while. You know, I have all these interesting stories from that part of my life. but also from the things that I'm doing now, the stories that we have in working with clients and serving organizations that really need help, and being in the classroom and talking to students and hearing about what their points of view are. So I try to bring all of that into anything that I do. And when I'm speaking about things that matter to me, I think it always matters a lot more to the listener if it's personal in some way. So that's what I'm really hoping to accomplish with what we're doing in the marketing gateway is not just to hear me talk all the time, but also to hear these guests that we have that are a lot of times they're working for really cool, awesome organizations. They maybe don't have a voice where they're out there a lot talking about what they're doing, but when you hear them, you just get excited, you get interested. And the more we can draw in their personal side of the story, the things that they actually care about and that they're passionate about, the more exciting it is for everyone.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, well, I hope that it really is a very good lead generation strategy for you. It has been very good for our company here. But what's next for you and your team? What are you thinking about over at Research and Planning Group? What's coming up?

Sean Jordan: I'm always trying to think about the future because anytime you think something is going to be the same for a while, it starts to change. And, one example, so we're using question pro now we were using Qualtrics a few years ago and Qualtrics was a great platform. I loved it. I was a certified Qualtrics guy, I went to all their conferences and everything and now I won't recommend them to anybody because they changed or rather they didn't change enough in the right ways and they changed in the wrong ways and I found out Question Pro was a good alternative. We have to be open to these things and there are so many new technologies and techniques that come up that are exotic and that hang around for a few years and go nowhere but there are also things that we have to get really comfortable with because they're gonna be here to stay and when I started people were still getting used to the idea of online surveys. And now it's hard to find anybody that's doing surveys any other way. It was hard to find people that were doing online focus groups when I started. And now that's the common way that I'm doing them. So we have to be open to those changes, but we also have to not be threatened by them. We have to look for ways that we can apply them and that they can be useful and find their benefits. And at the same time, make sure that we also don't buy into the hype behind them. Because there's an awful lot of people out there pitching, for example, AI solutions right now. that some of them are good, some of them are not good. You have to be discerning. But what you really have to ask at the end of the day is, am I getting the information that I need in the way that I need it to be able to do the research properly, or am I just finding something that's shiny and interesting and new, but it's not actually getting us to the points that we're looking for to input the strategy in action?

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, well that's really back to what you said at the beginning. You ask a lot of questions, you know, what is the answer you really you know, need to move your business forward. Let's really be clear about that first. Let's not just chase shiny objects, shiny new methodology, shiny new technology, et cetera, but really make sure that we're answering this question as completely as we possibly can so you know how to move your business forward and whether that business is as complicated as organ donation or if it's as complicated as delivering healthcare like in an emergent, you know, situation. That kind of information matters, like being able to really understand the experience of the consumer in that moment, whether it's deep, deep emotion or whether it's just more a little bit of a mix and match, pick something that you want as a consumer. So we all are dealing every day with kind of high level and low level decisions nonstop, but all of those make up you know, the difference of real profitability for a lot of companies. So I love it. Well, Sean, thank you so much for being on this with me. It was a pleasure meeting you and of course, meeting you through mutual friends. I'll give a couple of shout outs, but Cecil Puebenthingel for sure is one of our great friends we have in common and the Question Pro team, really great. In fact, you mentioned, I'll just say this because I'm friends with the Question Pro people, but you're right, Qualtrics has really fallen down on the job. And so if you like your ears perked up a little bit when you heard the difference between Question Pro and Qualtrics, if that is something that is of interest to you, go check out our friends at Question Pro. They did not pay me for saying that, but I think Sean and I both love, you know, really providing that experience and really connecting people meaningfully in this industry. I think it comes back to us when we act really on good intentions like that.

Sean Jordan: Absolutely.

Priscilla McKinney: I love it. Well, from all of the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.